Saturday, April 19 (Easter Saturday) – Burhave – Dorum – 45 km

The hotel, without hot water, is otherwise fine. I slept well. We drive the E-camper back to Richard and Daan and stop by a garage for the piece of iron in the tire, but it is closed on Easter Saturday. Then we take the gamble. We have breakfast together and around 10 o’clock we leave, Vincent and Liesbeth are also there again. We set off and we glide about 15 km along the dike off the wind and so are super fast in Blexum, where the ferry should take us to Bremerhaven. We can make it to the boat but I’d like to get some “Coincidence Harvesting” and the huge windmill tubes on film as a backdrop where the tree cycles past. A wonderfully surreal image. And then line up for the ferry. I carefully ride the tree bike onto it and cycle all the way past the front on cue, then I hear someone shout, “Nein, das geht nicht. Ich nehme dich nicht mit!” In other words whether I just wanted to get off the board again. My arguments made no impression, he thought, in summary, it was too dangerous, falling over, damaging cars and so on. I cycle back toward the “ramp” of the boat and have to wait for approaching cars. The somewhat agitated captain comes up to me and, after some more prattling, slowly turns around as the lady from ticket cutting asks him if that tone is necessary, and Sanne agrees that he should take responsibility. All in all, we are allowed to go anyway, I tilt the tree and place it against the side of the boat, as far away from the cars as possible. Fortunately, this saves us a few hours of detouring. We are the last ones off the boat, thank the captain and give him a tree. We are good friends again! He even made his excuses. Nice. We follow the komoot route through Bremer-haven and enter the harbor area on our way to Dorum which is north of Bremer-Haven. What a photogenic place. We call Richard to drone here too, a nice contrast to the many dikes with the many sheep we saw.

It is quite chilly again today, 10 degrees. I am already looking forward to days with 25 degrees and shorts. But that will take some time.

We cycle on to Dorum, partly along the dike that blocks the northwest wind well.

Around five o’clock we get there, in our sports hotel. Unfortunately we can’t cook here so we wander through Dorum for a while and end up on Easter Saturday evening in an Italian restaurant with a very good kitchen, or better cook. Delicious after such a day.

After a good week, I come to the conclusion that handing out the trees is going to be the most important action of this Tour2025. The other things are also important and nice. We should take the handing out very seriously and document it very well and always in the same way, and do 1 photo of the handing out and a photo of the happy person with a tree in his/her hand. Also sometimes asking for a text would be good.